US experts charge India with lying about plutonium's end-use

US experts want the Clinton
administration to bar India from using weapons-grade plutonium
available from its American-Canadian supplied research project for
making nuclear bombs.

Victor Gilinsky and Paul Leventhal, writing in the Washington
Post, contend that the military plutonium stocks India dipped into
for its recent nuclear tests came from the research project provided
years ago by the United States and Canada. India had promised both
countries it would not use this plutonium for bombs.

''If Washington and Ottawa were now to keep India to its promise
and verify this, India would lose more than half the weapons-grade
plutonium for its nuclear bombs and missiles,'' they say, adding,
''The US and Canada should make this an essential
condition for the lifting of economic sanctions.''

They say the plutonium in question is approximately 600
pounds -- enough for about 50 bombs -- produced in India's Cirrus
research reactor since it began operating in 1960. This was an
''atoms for peace'' reactor built by Canada and made operable by an
essential 21 tonnes of heavy water supplied by the United States.

In return for this assistance, they point out, India promised
both suppliers in writing that the reactor would be reserved for
''peaceful purposes.''

India used plutonium from this reactor for its 1974 nuclear
explosion. When the facts emerged, the then prime minister Indira
Gandhi insisted there had been no violation of the peaceful-use
commitments because India had set of a ''peaceful nuclear
explosion.''

Energy consultant Gilinsky and Nuclear Control Institute
president Leventhal were, respectively, a member of the nuclear
regulatory commission and of the US senate staff, at the time of
India's 1974 test.

They say the Indian scientist then in charge, Raja Ramanna, now
has admitted it was a bomb all along and India now has declared
itself a nuclear-weapons state on the basis of its current tests.

With the decades-old peaceful ''pretence'' stripped away, the
United States and Canada should make unambiguously clear that India
may not use Cirrus plutonium for warheads and related research, they
add.

They also draw attention to a 1963 agreement covering two
US-supplied nuclear power reactors at Tarapur and their fuel. The
radioactive used fuel from these reactors is in storage and contains
most of India's ''reactor-grade'' plutonium.

India has said it will reprocess the used fuel to extract the
plutonium for use as civilian power-reactor fuel. But reactor-grade
plutonium is also explosive and, once separated, it could be used
by India's scientists for rapid deployment in warheads. There is
enough Tarapur plutonium for hundreds of them, they say.